Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project

Joseph Timothy

Description

The atomic age began at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, with the explosion of “the Gadget” at Trinity near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Prelude to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which forced the capitulation of Japan and ended World War II, the Trinity test was the culmination of herculean efforts by scientists, civilians, and the military of the United States to tap the potential of the atom for a wartime emergency. If Nazi Germany could engineer the bomb first, an Allied victory against Hitler was all but lost. Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project is a look back at the epic struggle to build the world’s first atomic bomb. 

Nearly 200 images in vivid black-and-white reveal the project as it unfolded, from its secretive origins at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, to the day Americans celebrated triumph over the Axis powers with victory over Japan. A pinnacle moment in the history of the United States, the Manhattan Project’s application of Einstein’s famous equation E=MC² shows, perhaps better than any other single endeavor, what can be achieved by human ingenuity when the citizens of a great nation are united in freedom against a fearsome and despotic foe.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Collections photographiques
• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• History of the United States
• Trinity (nuclear test)
• World War II
• Manhattan Project
• United States
• History
• Gadget
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618584380
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

H ISTORIC P HOTOS OF
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
T EXT AND C APTIONS BY T IMOTHY J OSEPH , P H .D.
In September 1942, when General Leslie Groves purchased 59,000 acres between Black Oak Ridge and the Clinch River as the first federal reserve for manufacturing nuclear material for the atomic bomb, there were only about 3,000 residents on rural farms in those valleys. By 1945 there were 75,000 people living in 10,000 family dwellings, 13,000 dormitory spaces, 5,000 trailers, and 16,000 barracks, forever changing the countryside.
H ISTORIC P HOTOS OF
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
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Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project
Copyright 2009 Turner Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008910973
ISBN-13: 978-1-59652-521-4
Printed in China
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16-0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE
L EADERS, S CIENTISTS, D ECISIONS, AND W AR
HOW AND WHY THE MANHATTAN PROJECT WAS BORN
H OW AND W HERE TO B UILD THE U NKNOWN
AN UNIMAGINABLE CONSTRUCTION CHALLENGE
W ORK AND F AMILY L IFE
THE DEDICATED AMERICANS WHO MADE IT ALL POSSIBLE
T URNING T HEORETICAL P HYSICS INTO N UCLEAR B OMBS
PROOF OF THE DEVASTATION AND SORROW AHEAD
T HE S ADNESS OF W ARFARE-THE C ELEBRATION OF P EACE
A DICHOTOMY OF EVIL AND GOOD
E PILOGUE
THE END OF A PROJECT, THE BEGINNING OF AN ERA
N OTES ON THE P HOTOGRAPHS
Automobiles are being checked before passing through the Elsa Gate portal into the Secret City of Oak Ridge. The home seen through the portal still stands today. The building to the right housed a business which had to be sold because it was inside the controlled area.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work, Historic Photos of the Manhattan Project , was made possible with photos from the National Archives; the Library of Congress; the United States Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.; the Oak Ridge Public Library; the United States Department of Energy, Oak Ridge Office; Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois; and the personal files of George D. Kerr, Knoxville; I appreciate their stewardship of this important and irreplaceable historical national resource.
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This book is a visual journey pursued through the eyes and work of those individuals who gave so much to the Manhattan Project effort. It documents in historical photos what can only be described as the most significant and far-reaching challenge the United States ever embarked on. This historical essay is dedicated to two peoples: the Americans who made it a success, and the ill-fated Japanese who suffered the consequence.
The honor of achievement belongs to every scientist, military and political leader, and every individual worker involved in the Manhattan Project. Although the project ended the war, it did so at a great cost to innocence. This journey is presented with utmost respect and sadness for every individual who unwillingly paid the price of war. Every American celebrated peace, while at the same time shed tears for those innocent people who died and suffered to bring about that peace. If only wisdom could wipe war from the face of the earth as quickly as were so many innocent souls.
P REFACE
Philosophers and laymen alike, past, present, and to come, have, and will continue to debate the decision that was made to use nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. What cannot be debated is whether or not nuclear weapons would have been created-the answer is clear-for even before such a weapon entered the minds of scientists in the United States, Germany was working hard to understand nuclear chain reaction in order to develop the worst of all weapons. What is debatable is what would have happened had our nation ignored the possibility that such a weapon could be created, and thus failed to undertake the enormous challenge to create this horrific technology. Had our enemy constructed the bomb first would it have been dropped on New York or San Francisco? Where would our nation be today had history unfolded differently? That is for all of us to ponder.
One cannot help associating the use of these dreadful weapons with the killing of thousands of innocent people, forgetting that far more innocent civilians were tragically killed using standard weaponry: guns, cannons, conventional bombs. The only difference between loss of life by thousands of small bombs during hundreds of bombing raids, or two enormous bomb blasts, is the magnitude of the explosion, the length of time required, and the simple fact that no conventional bomb could deliver enough of a threat to end the war.
Those two bomb blasts cost the lives of thousands, yet saved untold thousands. Many estimates have been made of the number of American and Japanese soldiers and civilians who would have lost their lives had not the war ended with the dropping of the second nuclear weapon, but the numbers far exceed the casualties inflicted by those two terrifying events. Too, there is no debate that bringing into play such a devastating device resulted in the unconditional surrender of the Japanese on August 14, 1945, a day of celebration around the world to announce that peace was finally real.
This book is a visual recounting of a single project like no other the world had ever seen. Never had so much been accomplished so quickly by so many. The statistics of time, manpower, organization, conditions, and construction were in and of themselves staggering, but equally so was the inconceivable pace in the advancement of the sciences required to make success possible. Perhaps the most bewildering aspect of this project was the construction of enormous industrial facilities to produce what no one knew how to produce when construction began. It is unheard of today to erect even a small building without detailed engineering drawings. But to build super-factories on the fly while the processes to go on in those facilities were still under development remains a prodigious achievement. Yet this is exactly what was done. So little was known about nuclear physics, nuclear chemistry, fission-fusion chain reactions, and reactor science that facilities utilizing different possible processes needed to be constructed simply because researchers could not wait for the proof that a process would achieve the intended result.
While working on this book I was asked by a woman, When did the Manhattan Project actually begin? I told her of various dates of official actions such as the August 13, 1942, establishment of the Manhattan Engineering District in New York City, and the June 17, 1943, decision by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build the pilot plant. Then I said to her, Actually, now that you ve made me think about it, here s when I believe this incredible project actually began. I picked up a copy of a letter and handed it to her.
On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to FDR, explaining that Nazi Germany was working to create a gruesome weapon of mass destruction, and telling the President that in his view, our nation should pull together the best scientific and industrial minds in the country and push theoretical physics into reality-we needed to build a nuclear bomb and we needed to build it first. Roosevelt recognized the wisdom of Einstein and entered this nation into the most important race in world history.
-Timothy Joseph, Ph.D .
Shown here at Los Alamos, these scientists played key roles in discovering how to construct a nuclear bomb. Dr. Earnest Lawrence (left) received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale in 1925, and in 1936 became Director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Enrico Fermi (center) was the project s lead scientist. Dr. Isidor Rabi received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All three were awarded a Nobel Prize. (National Archives)
L EADERS , S CIENTISTS , D ECISIONS, AND W AR
HOW AND WHY THE MANHATTAN PROJECT WAS BORN
Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, France and Britain immediately declared war on Germany, and World War II was under way, yet the United States remained neutral. That changed with the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. Suddenly the United States found itself in a world that was in war, with chaos and killing nearly everywhere. Immediately upon entering World War II the goal of the United States was to end it.
Wars are won in two ways-killing and fear of being killed. In the seven months before the two nuclear bombs were released on Japan, American bombing raids destroyed most of 67 Japanese cities killing hundreds of thousands, yet no end to the war was in sight, only more aggression. Changing conventional bombing raids to two single-nuclear-bomb drops instilled enough fear in the Japanese to bring about surrender and the end of the reign of terror on both sides. Estimates vary, but it is thought that as many as 500,000 Japanese died and some 5 million more were made homeless by war s end. Worldwide, it is estimated that more than 70 million people, most of them civilians, were killed in World War II, the deadliest conflict in all of human history.
The two bombs that brought about the Japanese surrender were conceived, designed, and built in one undertaking-the Manhattan Project. It formally began on August 13, 1942, when the Manhattan Engineering District was established and given the mission to do whatever it took to construct industrial-size plants to synthesize the plutonium and uranium needed for nuclear bombs, to de